The Undertaker

The profession of being a funeral director entails listening every day to strangers voicing their innermost thoughts and feelings, revealing their most private side. After a death has occurred, the funeral director is usually the first person to sit down with the members of a grieving family. A funeral director witnesses people of all ages, cultures and sensibilities breaking down emotionally. The role of the funeral director traditionally has been to make death appear seamless, invisible even, because death is a subject that traditionally has been repressed.

Much of our reaction on the subject of death is avoidance. Death simply isn’t a pleasant topic of conversation. Talking about it makes people uncomfortable. When it is discussed, it’s often done in formal or academic terms. Death is much easier to refer to in terms of the third person than in the first person. The more you can distance yourself from such a morbid subject, the better.

The grieving public has very mixed views towards funeral directors. Taking care of the dead requires dealing with details that most folks don’t want to think about. They don’t know, or want to know, how the job is done necessarily, yet they’re questioning of someone who has taken on death care as a career. Many family members I’ve met have outright told me they hope never to see me again or that they won’t be doing business with me any more. Usually those types of comments are couched in a joking tone, but there’s much truth beneath them. Once I met a woman who refused to shake my hand because I had an “odd profession” that was “dirty.”

The job of American undertaker originated during the Civil War. Because young men were dying in battle away from home, a town’s cooper, or barrel maker, was often hired by a family to “undertake” the trip to bring back the body of their loved one. It can also be said that the undertaker helped to take the dead under (the ground).

Whether the person had to be retrieved or died locally, the undertaker would measure the body for the coffin. Country estates often kept a stock of timber, felled from their own grounds, for the crafting of caskets. When the coffin was finished the undertaker would deliver it to the house, usually under cover of darkness, where he would set up a bier. The deceased remained at home, laid out in the parlor or the bedroom, until the time of the funeral. People didn’t question death, but they didn’t shine a light on it either. They took it in stride.

The families of the deceased would carry out the cumbersome task of placing the body of their loved one in the casket and then carrying it to a burial site. Before cemeteries were built, graves were dug wherever it was convenient, usually on people’s own property. With the development of transportation capabilities, undertakers eventually brought the deceased to their own location. Thus, the funeral “home”—and the funeral director—were born.

Over the years, the burden of death care has passed from the family to funeral directors. In fact, a major part of the job entailed shielding prominent families from sorrow and embarrassment so that their reputation in the community was maintained. Funerals were public events, and the funeral director made sure the occasion was dignified and respectable—an approach that continues to this day.

Yet, more and more, people want to know what’s going on behind those doors that have been closed for so long. They want to be directly involved, not shuffled along through routine channels. They understand that learning about the unknown is a way of facing their fears. In fact, it has been suggested in research studies that facing your fears actually facilitates and alleviates the grief process. Part of the funeral director’s responsibility is to lead survivors down a healthy grieving path.

It’s in this context that I deviate from using the term “funeral director,” which is somewhat outdated. It also has a bit of a stigma attached to it insofar as it evokes visions of a tall, gaunt, humorless gentleman hovering in a dark, musty funeral parlor permeated with the cloying smell of decaying flowers. If you can choose a life coach, you certainly should be entitled to the services of a sophisticated, savvy “death care consultant.”

For more interesting reading about the history of funerals and funeral directors, I suggest the following book

Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial